If you show any promise as a writer in Britain, in London — that’s fine, and people will give you work, and so forth — but you keep feeling all the time you’re having to pass through a series of tests and hoops — “He’s quite promising,” and so forth.

You can die of that kind of encouragement.

Where in America if you are willing to take the chance and say, “Here I am. Try this,” you don’t feel you’re having to go through these stages of evolution; maturing in the cask like a fine old vintage that in the end goes sour before it’s ripe.